This is a game that goes in the group of deceiving board games in which the fun comes from managing to make the rest believe your lies to then see them fail in the decisions and grab their money or goods for you.

This said, the main problem with the game is a clear mistake in its design.

If you still don’t know how the game is played then let me simplify it by saying that the game rewards you for playing “legally” and punishes you for trying to deal with illegal goods, which is the actual interesting part of the game.

If you already know what the game is about let me explain myself better.

The risk of trying to get illegal goods through the border is very high. They don’t really reward you with that much of an extra value in comparison to the legal goods, and if you were to be caught, the heavy price to be paid, that does not only make yourself poorer but you enemies richer, puts a huge distance in the scores.

In the other hand, getting a ton of legal goods is 100% safe, and even if you were to receive no extra money from a sheriff opening your legal bag because of misplaced suspicions, it still earns a lot of money because due to how the game works it is simple to pile up groups of 3 or even 4 goods of the same type per bag almost every round. Add to this that at the end of the game having most of the goods of a type gives a hefty amount of gold and the first position is ensured.

In more games than not the winner is the person whom not even once decided to try to sneak anything illegal.

Don’t misunderstand me though. I am not saying that this is a bad game because it has a flaw in the core mechanic of the game (which is certainly not good). I have had a ton of fun playing it. But this is because when I play this is the one of few games that I don’t play to win (and I hate not playing to win!!!!) to instead have extra fun by trying to sneak my pointy peppery apples or receiving heavy bags full of taxes to let the merchants pass without inspection for the sake of fast circulation in the main gate of course.

As the title shows, I’ll simply explain what effect the dice have in this game as a strategic one, from my point of view.

– The first thing I have to say is that the dice don’t affect much the strategy of the game and, even though luck could make some points of difference, the winner will be the one that has played best and not who has rolled better.

– Playing with dice means that there is no way to control the “main resource” to buy things and because of that, even if a general strategy is possible to follow, adaptability is necessary in order to avoid wasting +/- modifiers and losing points. So the dice make the players making decisions each turn and don’t let to plan far ahead.

– The dice make the last turn a little bit of a waste in some situations. This is sometimes a problem when a game ends in a certain amount of time instead of when someone achieves victory, but dice make it worse. Unless you save goods to sell or a last construction and some modifiers in front of you, is difficult to plan something as you can’t know which numbers you will have to use. As the last part of a game is usually the most important one to feel satisfied after playing it, this is one of the bad parts of the game.

I personally like the game, and think that the way the dice work is well prepared.

First of all, I will clarify that I wont make a explanation of how the game is played nor a list of good and bad things it has. I will simply point out one positive aspect of it that I find interesting and maybe some other stuff related to the same.

So, the thing is that Hanabi is a game that works strangely well like a light or medium game. Let me explain:

It is true that usually medium games and sometimes also heavy games can be played less seriously and still enjoy them, in a lighter way. But they tend to lose something, they are prepared to play with the correspondent effort and it they are not as good without it. But in Hanabi the situation changes.

At first sight, it seems to be a light game, in which the first try almost always ends up without having thought that much for the hints and actions. It can be played in that way when the mood isn’t a good one to intense games, or the players simply don’t like heavy games. This way, the game is really fun and the interaction implemented by “cheats” which we would call house rules is fantastic.

The best thing though is that there is still a lot more to the game. It can perfectly be played as a medium to heavy game, not long, but with a lot of thinking involved. After the first games new strategies come up, and is unbelievable how many forms of interpreting the hint there are, and how much things can be said just by “the two cards are blue”!

Because of all of this I think that, for just 10$, this is one of the games that can be played with both family and “serious” gamer friends.

As there are already a lot of rating and reviews or comments based on how fun for some people and chaotic for others Munchkin is I´ll just focus on the aspect of the replayability which I consider one of the most important in board games. Because I’m quite sure we all want to get to spend well the money that required some hours of hard work.

So, Munchkin sure is a really fun game at least if you like rol-playing experiences in which you parody other pencil&paper RPGs like D&D. But the problem with this one is that it is based on a quite long list of jokes graphically put on cards, long of course, but not infinite. And we all know what happens with jokes, once heared, it might still be a bit funny the second time, but that’s it. If you sit around a table to play the fifth Munchkin game you probably will no longer be able to do any interpretation of how you open the next door or how 68275 orcs have appeared when you did because those things have already been said in many ways at the four earlier games and they are no longer funny.

And what happens when we quit all those funny and entertaining jokes? Well, we will have in front of us a simple little card game that could be played once in a while, but being honest, there are a lot of other card games I would choose rather than munchkin at least if it is not because a friend has a new expansion, of which munchkin has a lot, and we are gonna try some new “cards”/jokes.

In conclusion. I think Munchkin is a good game to buy with a group of friends spending a little amount each and play it twice. But don’t expect to play it once each month nor even twice a year because it ends up being boring.

When no task seems immediately reachable, it is usually a good idea to try and destroy some enemy pieces without deviating too much from our plan. But it is important to aim for the important ones considering that 2 well taken pieces will bring our opponents further from their objectives than 3 or 4 at random.

If we don’t really know what shapes the enemy could have it might be wise to go for the most recently placed tokens since they are likely to be part of the card trying to be played.

We usually play changing how the robber works. I’m not going to say that it is better or worse but strategies surely change a bit and I personally like it more this way.

So the thing is that, every time the robber has to move, whether it is because of a knight or a 7, he will move just to an adjacent space. This way the spots near the desert are more risky since the robber will start near them.

As I said strategies change a bit. Playing this way knights become way more useful as spending some of them can ensure having the robber far from you resource numbers for all the game, and also making other people go for tough decisions, because they might end up having to move it but to one of their own spots, because there is no other place to go near.

In case you were to decide to play like this, adding the possibility to play many technology cards in a single turn is almost necessary, since it includes the possibility to move the robber more than a tile each turn. Otherwise, the robber could got stuck in an area just because someone is playing robbers after you and so there is no way to move it somewhere else, or because some unlucky 7 are thrown.

I hope you enjoy this little change as much as our team does, at least try it, and if you don’t get to like it just ignore this post, because, games exist to have fun! =D

I have tested the idea posted here about playing with the rooms face down and it sure is more challenging, but if you wanna go for a still more challenging game, try this too.

Whenever a player loses health, that player has to roll an amount of dice equal to the total – the health lost when completing any task, and this way there will be certain moments when some room will be even impossible to complete for a while.

Also, even thought playing with the rooms face down doesn’t work so well, we used to apply another rule for the sanity:

Before deciding where to go a player must roll a D6 to decide if he/she has gone insane. Each point lost adds another possibility and so for example, if a player has lost 2 points of sanity a 1 or 2 result in a D6 will mean that the room he/she will go to is gonna be chosen randomly, (with a D6/D8/D10 depending on the number of rooms.)